The holidays are a great time to reach out to current and potential clients. The reason: holiday greetings and online gifts provide an excellent opportunity for viral marketing. Viral marketing is a marketing strategy that facilitates and encourages people to pass along a marketing message voluntarily. Like regifting… only they can be regifted a gazillion times. Viral marketing typically involves messages, greetings or information that are free, interesting or fun and leverage existing and easy to use communications networks, like email. Viral promotions may take the form of video clips, interactive games, images, or even….fruitcakes.
The goal of marketers interested in creating successful viral marketing programs is to identify individuals with high Social Networking Potential (SNP) and create viral messages that appeal to this segment of the population. The more creative or relevant…the better chance it will passed on, or regifted… like a fruitcake.
To demonstrate, suppose someone, like us, sent you an online gift like… a fruitcake. Well what are you supposed to do with the gift of fruitcake? What does anyone do with the gift of fruitcake? Regift!… That’s the spirit of viral marketing. This year, people went nuts for our greeting our ‘do-it-your-self’ fruitcake. We sent it to our core email list, along with an option to ‘regift’ it others. We also sent out a link on our Twitter, and other social networks.
The result: an increase in traffic to our Web site and our blog, and multitudes of positive comments from regiftees. The positive word of mouth that we built with our simple holiday gesture is priceless from a marketing standpoint, and the perfect example of a successful viral marketing campaign.
Click here to get, send and/or ‘regift’ your own fruitcake.
If you’d like more marketing tips on viral and other types of campaigns, or would like to receive more things like do-it-yourself fruitcakes, click here.
Dan Droz is Chairman and CEO of Droz & Associates: Marketing, Branding, Design, Public Relations, Advertising, Web Design, Interactive Marketing for Pittsburgh and surrounding regions.
Monday, December 22nd, 2008
Advertising, Branding, Design, Interactive Marketing, Marketing, Pittsburgh, Public Relations, Sales, Uncategorized, Web Design No Comments
Will The Real Designer Please Stand Up
Like many ideas, successful designs have many authors, as true of high technology innovation and more mundane products. Brothers Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss who co-founded ConnectU predated both Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook and the MySpace Trio of Tom Anderson, Chris DeWolfe and Brad Greenspan of MySpace. But who got the fame (and fortune)? Winners are often not the originators.
Sometimes, it’s not just a matter of who succeeded and who failed. Take the ice cream cone. Origination has been attributed to Charles and Frank Menches, ice cream vendors at the 1904 St. Louis, Missouri Louisiana Purchase Exposition, an early “World’s Fair,” when they ran out of the dishes they were using to serve their wares. As the story goes, with lines gathering, Frank turned to the vendor next to him, a Syrian pastry maker, Ernst Hamwi, who was selling Zalabia, a Middle-Eastern waffle-patterned pastry. He bought a stack of Zalabia, and Eureka, the ice cream cone was born.
The other ice cream vendors at that same fair, including Abe Doumar, founder of Doumar’s Cones and BBQ in Norfolk, Virginia, Nick and Albert Kabbaz, David Avayou and Arnold Fornachou, who were also using the same method, at the same time, with the same story, have receded into the miasma of design history. And this doesn’t even take into account the cones served at Frascati, the Paris restaurant, documented in an 1807 engraving, the paper and metal cones used throughout Europe during the 1800’s and Agnes Marshall’s recipe for “Cornet with Cream” published in her 1888 Cookbook, Mrs. A. B. Marshall’s Cookery Book.
The Power of the Pen
So, how did Frank (and Charles) become the “originators?” The legend was popularized 24 years later, in the 1928 Ice Cream Trade Journal, in an article that told the story. The writer: Frank Menches, who, by then had formed the Cornucopia Waffle Company (later the Missouri Cone Company), selling millions of cones a year. Interestingly, the article appeared in the same year that Frederick Bruckman, a competitor from Portland, Oregon, sold his company to Nabisco. Call it irony. Or competitive positioning.
There is no doubt there is truth all the stories. But, in consideration of the number of instances of ’simultaneous invention,’ it’s also clear that the title of ‘originator’ can often go to the man who writes the story.
Dan Droz is Chairman and CEO of Droz & Associates: Marketing, Branding, Design, Public Relations, Advertising, Web Design, Interactive Marketing for Pittsburgh and surrounding regions.
Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008
Branding, Design, Marketing, Pittsburgh, Public Relations, Sales No Comments